City blight fight targets Southwest Detroit Hospital

Rivets that held into place the name Southwest Detroit Hospital are all that remains on the corner of the abandoned hospital in Detroit on Wednesday, September 9, 2015.
The hospital sits on 9 acres and has been owned by Harley Brown since 1995.
Besides having a crew of 11 people paint over the graffiti that covered the outside of the building Brown had them mow the grass and pick up lots of trash from broken bottles to car parts and other types of trash.
(Photo: Eric Seals)

Detroit’s battle to force commercial property owners to fix up or tear down blighted buildings has taken on a big target: the old Southwest Detroit Hospital, the eyesore visible from the junction of I-75, I-96 and Michigan Avenue.

The Duggan administration reached a consent agreement with the building’s owner, Harley Brown, in July. It requires Brown to paint over the graffiti that has covered the building for years, secure it from vandals, pump out water in the below-ground truck delivery wells, remove overgrown vegetation, remove trash and debris from the site and repair the exterior.

The agreement called for the work to be done by Aug. 10, but the city agreed to extend the deadline because Brown and the 11-person cleanup crew has been making significant progress, said the city’s top lawyer, corporation counsel Melvin (Butch) Hollowell.

“Southwest (hospital) has been one of the biggest eyesores in the city of Detroit for more than a decade, and it’s very visible from three of the major freeways,” Hollowell said this week. “It’s really moving in the right direction. It looks 85% better than it did before.”

Bertin Garita, who works at his father's upscale Mexican-Italian restaurant El Barzon on Junction near Michigan Avenue, said it's a relief to see the building getting cleaned up.

"For us, it's good because people from out of town or the suburbs come in and see the building has graffiti all over it," Garita said. "They see it's right next to Corktown. If they clean it up, they'll see that the neighborhood is cleaning up" and that might encourage more redevelopment of the area.

The consent agreement with Brown marks the 80th commercial property to be targeted by a team of six city lawyers working to remediate blighted buildings or have them torn down through nuisance abatement laws, Hollowell said. With the threat of court action, the city and building owners agree to clean up and secure blighted properties or risk losing them to the Detroit Land Bank Authority.

Of the 80 commercial blight cases filed since January 2014, 23 have resulted in full compliance with the city's consent agreements, five have been torn down at the owners' expense, and 52 are still being worked out, Hollowell said. The city generally has gone after buildings that are a danger to the public or are adjacent to neighborhoods that the land bank and the city's General Services Department have been trying to stabilize by selling homes at auction and removing blight.

Brown, whose Community Health Care Providers owns the facility, said Wednesday that he's done his best to keep the facility in shape, but faced a relentless onslaught of people coming to the hospital to take photos and tag it with graffiti, as well as homeless people and scrappers who break in. He estimated he's had 36 people arrested over the years for trespassing, vandalism and illegal scrapping of metals. He has owned the building since 1995.

The hospital had been open to vandals since 2009, when Brown said he ran out of money to pay for round-the-clock security.

"We've been in negotiations since the wintertime," Brown said of talks with the city about fixing up the hospital, discussions he characterized as cooperative. Mayor Mike Duggan "is a good man, and I've had a good relationship with him. I just want to do the right thing. The city's moving forward, and I want to be part of that productivity."

The five-story, 216-bed hospital with a silver exterior opened in 1974 on nine acres and suffered financial troubles for years before it went bankrupt and closed in December 1991. It was formed through the merger of four other black-run hospitals deemed outdated at the time -- Boulevard General, Trumbull General, Burton Mercy and Delray General. Southwest had debts of $20 million when it filed for Chapter 11 protection.

Analysts at the time said that the hospital’s financial woes could be blamed in part on a large number of its patients being poor and uninsured – part of the hospital’s mission was to treat anyone regardless of income – but also on the city’s loss of population and rising costs of providing health care.

Despite announced proposals to sell or reuse the building over the years, it never reopened as a hospital but housed other health care-related businesses. It has been vacant since 2007.

If it were to be reused, it most likely would not be as a hospital because it’s “physically and structurally obsolete,” said David McNabnay, a commercial real estate broker whose Bloomfield Hills firm McNabnay and Associates specializes in medical buildings.

“It’s a very old facility, and I don’t think there’s any way physically or financially to make it into a hospital again,” McNabnay said. “There may be a conversion possible for somebody who’s creative.”

Brown said he's aiming to have plans ready by March for a long-term reuse of the property. Among the ideas are a medical facility that provides mental health care for veterans and the homeless, but he said he’s leaving options open and hopes city and state leaders will cooperate with him to create something that provides jobs in a city with high unemployment.

In the meantime, he hopes to have all of the remediation work completed within two weeks, and is looking into the possibility of hosting a Halloween “haunted hospital” – complete with props, people posing as zombies and the like.

"The city's always been supportive of some kind of reuse of this property," Brown said. "We just have to have everybody put their heads together. You know, they say Michael Jordan was the best player in the NBA but he never got a ring until he had a team."